manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I
remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that
time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to
shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to
contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire
endurance that was over.
“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the
unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive.
Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had
killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his
father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for
vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would
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never know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the
possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and
act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful
of me—rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I
have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her
married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether
perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next
generation my place was a blank.”
“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a
daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been
that child.”
“You, Lucie? It is out of the consolation and restoration you
have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass
between us and the moon on this last night.—What did I say just
now?”
“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”
“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the
silence have touched me in a different way—have affected me with
something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that
had pain for its foundations could—I have imagined her as coming
to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom beyond the
fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see
you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the
little grated window and the door. But, you understand that that
was not the child I am speaking of?”
“The figure was not; the—the—image; the fancy?”
“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed
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sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind
pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward
appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother.
The other had that likeness too—as you have—but was not the
same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you
must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed
distinctions.”
His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood
from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.
“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the
moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me that the
home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her
lost father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers.
Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded
it all.”
“I was that child, my father. I was not half so good, but in my
love that was I.”
“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of
Beauvais, “and they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity
me. When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far from"};
